Tela Network

Great selection. 1/ Building on Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's point: Civilisation itself is not spontaneous and self-sustaining, and its reproduction requires force in the form of artificial and purposeful constraints. Force is applied by the body-politic against material scarcity and environmental uncertainty, other polities, and its members. Individuals internalise force as constraints, but in concentrated form re-express it into renewed institutional structures. Force acts on human drives, channelling them into constrained action-spaces from which political order emerges. I've been thinking of this as the "force model of civilisation". 2/ I would add that the "contradiction" of liberal democracy (individual sovereignty + equality claims) is a _constitutive_ tension. It's a Nietzschean 'tension of the spirit', produced through the sustained channelling and constraining of human drives, which extends the reach of possible action, both generative and destructive.

In 1991 Georgy Arbatov, Gorbachev's diplomatic adviser, said: "We are going to do you the worst of services: we are going to deprive you of the Enemy." In response to this, General Maisonneuve, Canadian Army lieutenant general and NATO chief of staff, wrote: "The Soviet Enemy had all the qualities of the good enemy: solid, constant, coherent. Militarily, it resembles us and is built on the purest Clausewitzien model. Disturbing, yes, but known and predictable. Their disappearance weakens our cohesion and renders our power useless." - Elvira Roca Barea, 'Imperiofobia y Leyenda Negra. Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y El Imperio Español'. Chapter 5. (2016) (Translation and minor edits are mine)

Give the adventurer a good brain, a good education, a supply of genius and an historical opportunity, and he becomes a Napoleon or an Alexander. Give him a great ideal and he becomes a Garibaldi. Give him a chance and he becomes a Mussolini. Give him a job and he becomes a soldier and a general. Ignore him and he becomes the gangster and the outlaw. A believer in final causes might soundly assert that the man of violence was invented by a wise Creator as a sort of catalyzer for human progress. On the other hand, the man of violence is not much more than that. The world that he creates is a pretty wretched affair. Give him the power and he regularly enslaves the rest of men, leaving them only the bare means of subsistence. Quite regularly he stultifies thought into hypocrisy and flattery, and the stimulating lift of organized public spirit he replaces with some form of mob fanaticism. - Arthur Livingston (1938) 'Introduction', in "The Ruling Class" (1896) by Gaetano Mosca, pg. 21

The maxim that there is nothing new under the sun is a very true maxim; that is to say, it covers about half the truth, which is a great deal of truth for a maxim to cover. - Arthur Livingston, (1938) 'Introduction', in "The Ruling Class (Elementi di Scienza Politica)" (1896) by Gaetano Mosca, pg. 8

(Disclaimer: There are no trusted sources on the internet.) It seems Q-Anon / Alex Jones might've been _fundamentally_ correct about the Western elite. Paedophiles, cannibals, vampires. "What is to be done?" This question is now a more fundamental, there-are-monsters-in-the-dark one. Anyone living under the money-printer is living under _that_ moral order. It seems appropriate to frame this apocalyptically, specifically in a Genesis 6:22 way. The choice is now moral. The world is wicked and we must build an arc. I do mean this practically. I don't see a way to raise a family unless you build an arc with others that do as God commands. I also can't stand the idea of not fighting against evil. I'd like a death of the self. Huge pendulum swing. We've gone full self-realization and it's been catastrophic. Time to kill the ego and hear the word of God again. Otherwise, I don't see how we don't get herded, bled, and eaten by vampires.

" The good news isn’t good unless the "bad news" is bad. […] The world, the flesh, and the devil are working very hard to conceal or blunt the bad news. Sick? There’s a pill for that. Aging body? There’s a nip-and-tuck. Lonely or worried or restless or afraid or heartbroken? There’s shopping and sex and bourbon and YouTube. Anything, anything rather than facing the bad news that I will, that I must, sicken and die and decompose and be forgotten from the face of the earth because of my inheritance of Adam’s curse, and my complicity in that same curse by my sins. […] There is something deeply, cosmically wrong with the universe, and without the intervention of a deity, my final end is utter, total erasure and senility and death and rotting and oblivion. "Remember your last days." writes Sirach. "Remember death and decay." " - Kelly Scott Franklin, 'The Bad News', in The Lamp Magazine, Issue 31. https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-31/the-bad-news

" Nos Hercules et Achilles non sumus, sed imbelles et minime ad bella nati. " (We are not Hercules or Achilles, but un-warlike and by no means born for war.) - Antonio de Ferraris (Antonius Galateus, fl. late 15th–early 16th) saw his city of Otranto fall in 1480 to the Turks. In the 1520s, Algeria falls to the famed pirate Redbeard and under the rule of the Turkish sultan. Rhodes follows suit, after centuries of being governed and defended by the Knights of St. John. Feeling no particular sympathy for the Spanish, De Ferraris nonetheless sees that Italy has very few options left. It is rich and too close to the Turks. It either falls to the Turks - which means slavery and degradation, or it allows itself to be defended by those willing to do so - the Spanish. The peninsula is divided politically and not ready for war.

" To act violently to draw out an opponent’s efforts while manoeuvring under cover to destabilize their centre of gravity and resolve the action with minimal confrontation. Making it so an opponent feels intellectually and morally defeated before they are materially defeated. This means conceiving action based on a few basic parameters: what our adversary expects us to do, what we want to achieve, how we make them believe they are in the right, and how we resolve the dilemma of the use of force. It is a constant exercise in Go, the popular and ancient Chinese game cited by Confucius more than 2,500 years ago. " Francisco Gan Pampols on Sun Tzu's recurring idea of "occultation" or the simultaneous undergoing of several actions to disguise one's true purpose in war In 'The Art of War', Sun Tzu (with commentary by the Lieutenant General Francisco Gan Pampols) (2025). Translation is ChatGPT’s & mine.

" In the 1950s, there was a great cult of Progress in the West. We've beaten the Nazis. We've got all these scientific advances. We're going forward out into space. Mankind is being drawn together through communications. Modernity is bringing all sorts of gifts. And the old paradigms don't work. We're having extreme unction in the face of laser surgery. We're having blessings of cars while we're sending people to the moon. This is an easy trap to fall into: to think that because things have changed so much in the immediate, that somehow the realities have changed. " - Charles A. Coulombe is an American author and historian. "Symposia | Ep. 4: Fish With Their Heads On" (00:37:39), The European Conservative YouTube: https://youtu.be/Tnx_830VlMI?

" … The territories of an empire, when the empire collapses, go through a long stage of social and political turmoil, dragged along by all manner of fragmenting tendencies that generate enormous conflict. […] Feudalism is the result of the fall of the Roman Empire - that is, of the failure of _the State_. Feudalism arises automatically whenever such a breakdown of the State occurs, for feudalism is nothing other than the search for personal alliances above the law. The world becomes too insecure to trust strangers. " Translation is my own. - Elvira Roca Barea, 'Imperiofobia y Leyenda Negra. Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y El Imperio Español'. Chapter 7. (2016)